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Ebenezer Jones
Ebenezer Jones (January 20, 1820 - September 14, 1860) was an English poet, who has been called "the worst poet in the world."Christopher Howse, "Happy birthday, Ebenezer Jones, the worst poet in the world," The Telegraph, Jan. 19, 2010. Web, May 6, 2012. Life Overview Jones wrote a good deal of poetry of very unequal merit, but at his best shows a true poetic vein. He was befriended by Browning and Rossetti. His chief work was Studies of Sensation and Event (1843). His most widely appreciated poems were "To the Snow," "To Death," and "When the World is Burning." He made an unhappy marriage, which ended in a separation.John William Cousin, "Jones, Ebenezer," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 215. Wikisource, Web, Jan. 31, 2018. Youth Jones was born in Canonbury Square, Islington, London. His father was of Welsh extraction; his mother, Hannah Sumner, was of an Essex family. They were in comfortable circumstances, and professed the strictest form of Calvinism. Ebenezer's education at a dreary middle-class school was as unsuitable to a young poet as can be conceived; nor were his external circumstances more congenial to his aspirations when, after the family had become impoverished by the death of his father, he found himself, at 17, a clerk in a city firm connected with the tea-trade, working 12 hours a day, and obliged to witness grossly dishonest practices, a position from which he freed himself as soon as possible.Garnett, 96. He was, however, free to choose his own intellectual guides, and under the influence of Shelley and Carlyle rapidly developed the strenuous, but violently exaggerated, style of thinking and writing which long characterized his productions, while spending every leisure moment in study and composition, and saving every shilling to enable him to publish the poems which he fondly hoped were to emancipate him from the circumstances of his daily life. Career He was for a short time a follower of Robert Owen; a chartist, in the strict sense of the term, he never was, and the assertion probably arises from a confusion between him and his namesake, Ernest Charles Jones. His existence was blighted by a domestic sorrow, alluded to in Theodore Watts's mention of "one who did not requite his passion, but who passionately loved another man — a man to whom Ebenezer was very dear — and who soon afterwards died." The circumstances led Ebenezer in his despair "to throw" (as his brother Sumner expresses it) "the medley of his poems into the caldron of his ill-fated book." Studies of Sensation and Event were published in 1843, and met with the fate to be expected for anything so crude, so eccentric, and on a cursory inspection so ridiculous as a considerable portion of the book. The faults were patent to all, and blinded even the few who might otherwise have recognised the author's fire, passion, and picturesqueness. Jones felt utterly crushed as a poet, not so much by the indifference of the public as by the slighting, or even unkindly, reception of his book by the eminent authors to whom he had offered copies. Procter and Horne, however, were exceptions. The book's reception caused him to destroy his manuscripts and attempt to publish no more poetry."Ebenezer Jones (January 10, 1820- September 14, 1860), PoemHunter, Web, May 6, 2012. His distress was further augmented by an unhappy marriage contracted in the following year with Caroline Atherstone, niece of Edwin Atherstone (author of the Fall of Nineveh), which continued to harass him long after his separation from his wife. While earning his living as an accountant, he assisted his fast friend Mr. W. Linton in his political journalism, worked for the radical publishers Cleave & Hetherington, and published a tract on land reform, which passed unnoticed. That tract, The Land Monopoly: The suffering and demoralization caused by it; and the justice and expediency of its abolition, published in 1849, could reasonably be considered a precursor for Henry George's Progress and Poverty."Ebenezer Jones," Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Web, May 6, 2012. Eventually Jones fell into consumption, and as his health failed the old poetic impulse seemed to revive. Jones died on 14 September 1860, and for a while was forgotten. Writing Writing in The Telegraph in 2010, 190 years after Jones's birth, literary critic Christopher Howse pronounced Jones "the worst poet in the world." Howe quoted "a critic of his day" as remarking: "When Jones writes a bad line ... he writes a bad one with a vengeance. It is hardly possible to say how excruciatingly bad he is.” Howse added: "And so said the chorus of leading critics when his first (and last) volume Studies of Sensation and Event came out in 1843. True." However, Howse's quotation was not from a contemporary review, but from an 1878 letter from Lord de Tabley to Theodore Watts-Dunton (quoted by Watts-Dunton in the Atheneum Review in 1878); and what de Tabley had actually written was: :There are but few poets so tantalizing in their performance as Ebenezer Jones. When he writes a bad line, he writes a bad one with a vengeance. It is hardly possible to say how excruciatingly bad he is now and then. And yet at his best, in organic rightness, beauty, and, above all, spontaneity, we must go among the very highest poetic names to match him.Theodore Watts, "Ebenezer Jones, The Atheneum, 1878, 401-403, British Periodicals Ltd. Google Books, Web, Feb. 14, 2017. (stress added) Commenting on the above lines in the Dictionary of National Biography, Richard Garnett wrote: "If any man of acknowledged literary standing had thus written in 1843, Ebenezer Jones would probably have been preserved to English literature." Howse also quoted a notorious excerpt from Jones's poem, "The Hand:" My hand I backward drave As one who seeks a knife; When startlingly did crave To quell that hand’s wild strife Some other hand; all rife With kindness, clasp’d it hard On mine, quick frequent claspings That would not be debarr’d. Commenting on the same poem, the Cambridge History of English and American Literature remarked: "But 'The Hand' and 'The Face' — these are the stock extracts, but it is as silly to neglect as it is degrading to rely on stock matter — have something that is not like other people, and is poetry."Ebenezer Jones, Cambridge History of English and American Literature (New York: Putnam, 1907-1921), VI. Bartleby.com, Web, May 6, 2012. 3 poems written near the close of Jones's life ("Winter Hymn to the Snow," "When the World is Burning," and "To Death") show the space his mind had traversed in the interval of silence. Daringly original in conception, these remarkable pieces are also almost perfect in expression; more striking than the most striking things in Studies of Sensation and Event, and entirely exempt from the crude vehemence of that ill-starred book. There can be no question of Jones's genius; his infirmities were those of most young poets, especially the self-taught; his latest productions show that his faults had gradually cured themselves, and that he needed nothing but fortitude to have taken a distinguished place among English poets. Personally he was as amiable as enthusiastic, deficient only in steadiness of purpose and virtues of the self-regarding order. Recognition In 1870, Dante Rossetti spoke in Notes and Queries of Jones's "vivid disorderly power," and prophesied that he would some day be disinterred. William Bell Scott followed to the same effect, and in 1878 R.H. Shepherd "issued a little brochure giving a brief account of Ebenezer Jones and his volume, and quoting some half-dozen of his most striking and remarkable lyrics." This occasioned a most interesting series of biographical papers in the Athenæum of September and October 1878, by Watts; and in 1879 Shepherd published a nearly complete edition of Studies of Sensation and Event, with corrections by the author himself, a few additional pieces, a memoir by Ebenezer's brother Sumner, and reminiscences by Mr. W.J. Linton. A 2nd volume, containing Jones's prose writings and additional poems, preserved by his friend Horace Harral, was to have followed, but never appeared. His poem "When the World is Burning" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900."When the World is Burning," Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900 (edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch). Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1919). Bartleby.com, Web, May 6, 2012. Publications Poetry *''Studies of Sensation and Event: Poems. London: Charles Fox, 1843; **2nd edition (edited by Richard Herne Shepherd). London: Pickering, 1879. Non-fiction *The Land Monopoly: The suffering and demoralization caused by it, and the justice and expediency of its abolition. London: Charles Fox, 1849. ''Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Ebenezer Jones, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Sep. 8, 2013. See also * List of British poets References * . Wikisource, Web, Feb. 14, 2017. Notes External links ;Poems *"When the World is Burning" *"Rain" *Jones in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: "Song of te Kings of Gold," "The Face" * Ebenezer Jones at PoemHunter (2 poems) ;About *"Happy birthday, Ebenezer Jones, the worst poet in the world" at The Telegraph * Ebenezer Jones in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature. "Jones, Ebenezer". Category:1820 births Category:1860 deaths Category:English poets Category:19th-century poets Category:Poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poetasters